“He was beheaded at Stadelheim Prison,” Danforth said. “After the war, Rothaug was arrested and put on trial. By then I was working as an interpreter for the war crimes tribunal, so when it came time to interview witnesses I was transferred to Nuremberg.” He took a brief pause in this narrative, as if he knew that what he was about to tell me — the next twist in his story — would surprise me as much as it had surprised him. “One of the men I was assigned to question was named Gustav Teitler,” he continued. “A seedy little character. I hated him immediately.” Danforth’s gaze hardened. “I could have shot him without a blink.”
~ * ~
Nuremberg, Germany, 1946
“You are Gustav Teitler,” Danforth said with the unrelenting hardness of the man he had become.
“I am, yes.”
Teitler was a pudgy little fellow with the mild look of depart-ment-store clerk, and as he sat down in the chair in front of Danforth’s desk, he offered a smile that proclaimed his great willingness to cooperate. To this he added the usual look of hapless innocence Danforth had seen in a thousand German faces by then, all bafflement and consternation, as if their malign recent history had caught them completely by surprise.
“I am pleased to meet you, Herr Danforth,” Teitler said amiably.
They took their seats in a room just a few yards away from where an American tank sat idly in the square and American soldiers lounged about absent-mindedly smoking cigarettes, a fact that was not wasted on Gustav Teitler.
“The Russians are treating Germany like a dead whore,” he said. “We are fortunate that you Americans are —”
“The Russians are treating you better than you deserve,” Danforth interrupted sharply.
Danforth’s hatred of the Germans had been intensified by his recent visit to Plötzensee and his finding no clue of what had happened to Anna, a dead end that over the past days had caused him to conjure up a hundred dreadful fates for her. The grim speculations were made even more painful by the release of yet more terrible images from the trials, all of which had turned the language he loved and spoke so well into an object of repulsion.
“You’re here because you are associated with a judge who is going to be tried as a war criminal,” Danforth said sternly. “And you’re going to answer my questions fully. Do we understand each other?”
This was not a pose, and Teitler seemed to comprehend that he faced something volcanic in the man who sat opposite him.
“Of course, Captain Danforth,” Teitler said.
“Oswald Rothaug,” Danforth said briskly. “You were a stenographer in his courtroom.”
“Yes,” Teitler answered.
“At the Leo Katzenberger trial,” Danforth added.
“That was a terrible thing,” Teitler said. “The poor man couldn’t believe what was happening to him, that his life was at stake simply because —”
“Yes, yes,” Danforth interrupted curtly. He was not interested in any German show of sympathy for the fate of Leo Katzenberger. He began a series of questions designed to discover any incriminating evidence against Rothaug that might have been gained by such a lowly functionary as Gustav Teitler.
There wasn’t much, as the next hour proved, but Danforth slogged on through Teitler’s asides, how he had only “by chance” ended up as a court stenographer, as he’d once hoped to be a civil engineer. This dream had been dashed by the Great War, in which he’d been wounded; his career hopes had been destroyed, along with the Germany of his youth, and the country had been “ripe” for what happened next.
It was an old story, and Danforth had no sympathy.
“Did you see Rothaug at any point after the trial?” he asked by way of ending the tiresome and unenlightening interview.
“Once, yes,” Teitler answered. “In Berlin.”
“Did he say anything about Leo Katzenberger?”
Teitler took a moment to think before he answered. “They weren’t so happy with that trial, you know, the higher-ups,” he said. “So they moved Judge Rothaug to Berlin. He was just a low official when I ran into him. Working for the prosecutor’s office. A nothing. A rat sniffing around. Students, mostly. What they were doing. The Red Orchestra, that sort of thing.”
“The Red Orchestra?”
“You know, Commies,” Teitler said. “Students. They were young; they had no idea what they were up against.”
Young and with no idea of what they were up against, Danforth thought. As he once had been.
“Rothaug was talking about a traitor the Gestapo had arrested,” Teitler said. ‘“Like Katzenberger,’ he’d said, ‘another head cut off.’ He seemed to take a particular delight in it.”
“Why?” Danforth asked dryly. “They’d already cut off lots of heads.”
“This was a woman, and an American,” Teitler said. “Rothaug said that killing her would show these foreigners that their necks weren’t any thicker than the necks of German traitors.”
“When did you have this conversation?” Danforth asked.
“It was in the summer of 1943,” Teitler answered. “I was only in Berlin for a few days. There was no work in the courts for me, so I went back to Nuremberg.”
Danforth’s pen remained still. “Did he mention the woman’s name?”
Teitler shook his head.
“Did he describe her?”
“No.”
“Did he say anything else at all about her?”
This time Teitler shrugged. “Only that before they chopped off her head, they should shave off her hair.”
Danforth was careful not to allow himself to consider the possibility that this woman might have been Anna. And yet, over the following days, he could not stop thinking about what Teitler had told him. It was like the Spanish idiom for relentless worrying over a single thought: dar vueltas,“ incessant circling.” The prospect had led Danforth to an incessant circling of particular scenes: Anna at their first meeting; Anna strolling among the tombs of Père-Lachaise. She might have survived until the summer of 1943: this was the thought that awakened him each morning after he returned to Nuremberg following his interview with Teitler, and it was the thought that faded at last with sleep, though only after it had kept him up until nearly dawn.
For the next few days, Danforth went about his work, interviewing others distantly involved in the Katzenberger case, mostly judges who claimed to have had nothing but contempt for Rothaug, whom they described as a clown, a buffoon, a climber, and a toady. Teitler’s tiny clue continued to work like a needle in Danforth’s mind, consuming his every free moment, keeping him in his office until the early hours of the morning going through files, ledgers, accounting books, old newspapers, anything he could find that might hold, however distantly, a clue to the identity of the woman Rothaug had mentioned.
It was three o’clock in the morning, but the man Danforth saw when he glanced up from his desk looked freshly shaved and ready for the new day with none of Danforth’s hollow exhaustion in his eyes.